Our Notes & References

Western jazz for Soviet underground: an imposing samizdat of more than 300 leaves, compiling texts about European and American new jazz of the 1970s. The title leaf indicates the source of the English texts as Coda Magazine in 1976, a Canadian jazz journal published from 1958 to 2009. The Russian text however was edited by G. Sakharov and translated by three translators from the Soviet jazz milieu: Vladimir Belskii, Galina Griaznovaia and Aleksandr Mezdrikov.

Much of the material consists of interviews and articles by British jazz critic Derek Bailey, with a focus on “Company”, a collective of freely improvising jazz musicians, which included Bailey himself, Misha Mengelberg, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, and many others. An alphabetic index as well as a discography of the “Company” jazz improv group are also included.

Publications such as these would have been of great interest to a younger generation of jazz musicians following on the heels of the pioneering samizdat publications on American jazz prepared in the 1960s by the Voronezh-based ‘Group for the Study of Jazz in the USSR’ (‘Gruppa izucheniia dzhaza v SSSR’, or GID) and in particular by Iurii Vermenich. Aside from a few exceptions, these were some of the earliest sources to jazz made available to Soviet readers, at great personal expense, effort, and even risk of legal persecution. Although the print runs did not exceed some dozen copies, translations by Vermenich played a key role in forming the late Soviet jazz elite of the late 1960s to 1980s.

Our editor, Sakharov, was a young scientist from Sverdlovsk (today Ekaterinburg), and became instrumental in the creation of the first jazz clubs in the city, originally with the support of the local Komsomol. In various forms, a jazz club existed in Sverdlovsk into the 1980s, organising unofficial and even underground concerts, publishing a news bulletin, and issuing more serious publications such as the present work.

Provenance

From the collection of Ekaterinburg jazz musician and drummer, Valerii Chernavin, a pioneer of Soviet post-war jazz in the Urals. In the 1960-70s, Chernavin performed in underground jazz concerts together with Vladimir Presniakov and Igor Butman (through his descendants and the trade).

Bibliography

For more on the history of Ekaterinburg jazz, see online on ‘uralcult’ website.